A Vegetable Oil Producer Takes on the Ultimate Grow Local, Eat Local Challenge: To Make Chocolate from Domestic Cocoa

Meyer lemon, exclusive to LE CHOCOLAT DE H’s VISON outlet
— Note that it does not use domestic cocoa

VISON is a retail complex in Mie that promotes the richness of Japan’s food culture through a variety of experiences.

In VISON’s Sweets Village, you will find LE CHOCOLAT DE H, a chocolatier run by patissier Tsujiguchi Hironobu, and Cacao House, a greenhouse where domestic cacao trees are being carefully cultivated by Tsuji Oil Mills Co., Ltd.

Small cocoa pods sway in the greenhouse, seeming in response to the lofty ambition of producing all-domestic chocolate from the town of Taki. We wanted to learn more about this unusual attempt between a chocolatier and a vegetable oil producer to cultivate greenhouse cacao trees for the first time ever in Japan.

Evolving from Bean to Bar to Farm to Bar

LE CHOCOLAT DE H is located inside Confiture H, a pastry shop set up under the supervision of Tsujiguchi. Passing through two sets of doors, to ensure strict temperature control, you will discover beautiful chocolates that shine like gems neatly arranged in glass cases.

Pastry chef Komori Toshihide explains the store’s mission. “Our chocolatier’s aim is to create original chocolates using carefully selected ingredients, with a focus on Japanese ingredients and fermentation. We also specialize in single-origin chocolates that allow our customers to sense the personality of the world’s highest quality cocoa beans.”

Single origin refers to cocoa beans of a single variety grown by a single producer, instead of blending beans from multiple regions. This allows you to visualize the producer and understand the taste of each type of cocoa bean. LE CHOCOLAT DE H makes single-origin chocolates, as it has its own plantation in Peru with an attached fermentation facility.

Bean to Bar refers to integrating all the processes from selecting the cocoa beans to making the chocolate bar. LE CHOCOLAT DE H goes beyond this with a Farm to Bar approach that involves creating the very plantations that grow the cocoa beans.

Aiming for a Farm to Bar approach done entirely domestically

Let’s begin with how harvested cocoa beans are processed and transformed into beautiful chocolates.

“Cacao trees are delicate, which makes them very difficult to grow. The first step, after harvesting the carefully tended cocoa pods at a plantation that meets all the temperature, humidity, rainfall, and other growing conditions, is to split open the pods and remove the pulp and cocoa seeds. The removed seeds are placed in wooden boxes, covered with banana leaves or other materials, and allowed to ferment. Once the fermentation has completed and the seeds are transformed into beans, the beans are dried, bagged, and shipped. On arrival, the cocoa beans are sorted, roasted, and ground into raw chocolate.”

LE CHOCOLAT DE H’s Yoshikawa Minami outlet, which opened in 2021, has its own facility for managing cocoa bean roasting, grinding, and other production processes.

“Our ultimate goal is to use cocoa beans that we grow domestically, to make them into chocolate at our facility, and to put out all-Japanese chocolates.”

Thorough temperature and humidity controls are needed in even tropical regions that have the best climate for cultivating cacao. Despite this and despite cacao’s reputation for being difficult to grow, LE CHOCOLAT DE H wanted to produce cocoa in Japan. Tsuji Oil Mills, a producer of vegetable oil in Matsusaka, Mie, took action to realize this dream of Chef Tsujiguchi, Chef Komori, and other patissiers.

First in Japan to successfully cultivate cocoa pods in greenhouses

Tsuji Oil Mills, a producer and developer of cooking oils and seasonings, would seem, on first sight, to have no connection with cocoa. The company had, however, started growing cacao seedlings in plastic greenhouses that it had been using for a different business.

From the left: Seko Yuki, Vice-Chairman Tsuji Toshifumi,
and Kuroda Masao of Tsuji Oil Mills Co., Ltd.

Vice-Chairman Tsuji Toshifumi describes his company. “Tsuji Oil Mills was founded in 1947 as a domestic rapeseed oil extraction plant. 2022 marked our 75th anniversary. After regulations on domestic rapeseed were lifted, we began extracting corn oil. We also started researching and developing highly purified powdered soybean lecithin and we succeeded in producing it industrially. Later on, we maintained our core corn oil extraction business while taking on new challenges in new fields. A compelling part of our corporate culture is our willingness to try new endeavors.”

Despite this corporate culture, Vice-Chairman Tsuji says that “no one believed we would succeed” when the company decided to try cultivating and fermenting domestic cocoa at VISON. Trying not only to grow cacao trees domestically, something with almost no track record of success, but to do so in a greenhouse — something never done before in Japan … surely it was a recipe for disaster.

Amid these swirling doubts, the project leader, Vice-Chairman Tsuji, and the other leaders Kuroda Masao and Seko Yuki got into action. They brought 58 seedlings to the 225-square-meter plot of land and began growing them by trial and error.

A domestic cocoa pod grown at Cacao House

Kuroda carries on the story. “After we planted the seedlings, I would come every day to check on them. I made sure I closed the windows before I left because controlling the temperature is vital. Sometimes I would double-back because I was worried I’d left a window open. [laughs] I was incredibly happy when I discovered the first pod had appeared as if in time for VISON’s opening. The first pod didn’t grow to maturity, but it still gave us hope.”

Seko continues. “One of the strengths of our company is that we have professionals in many different fields. I was mainly in charge of the facility and equipment, but we have many people with a wealth of knowledge about fermentation and experts in cultivating seedlings. So over time, these people started to give us advice.”

The team installed equipment to automatically water the seedlings and control the temperature in the greenhouse. They also installed a remote camera so they could watch what was happening in the greenhouse in real time. They continued to watch over and look after each of the steadily growing seedlings as if they were their own children.

Aiming eventually to move from the first cocoa crop to stable production

Thanks to the team’s dedication, as of May 2022, the seedlings in VISON’s greenhouse have produced around 10 cocoa pods. All three agreed excitedly that this is where the real challenge begins.

Vice-Chairman Tsuji explains. “Even in the same greenhouse, there are places where cocoa pods grow and places where they don’t. We want to figure out what conditions have to be met for cocoa pods to grow and what the mechanisms are. We hope such knowledge will lead us to stable cocoa production.”

The future is definitely coming when cocoa grown in Cacao House is harvested and fermented and then processed at LE CHOCOLAT DE H into chocolates that are sold in stores. We look forward to the day that such chocolate — the ultimate Grow Local, Eat Local product — comes to fruition.